Monthly Archives: November 2012

The Regional Council voted on a motion by Cr Paul Bruce to review their support for the transport plan that supported the flyover.

Stuff’s online poll gave the majority to go with the tunnel as the best option – 48% over 38% against those who favoured the flyover. But views within the Regional Council are still finely balanced. We encourage you to email your regional councillors (being careful not to spam them with too many bulk emails) and encourage them to refuse to support a Basin Reserve flyover. Their email addresses are:

Thanks to the good work of Cr Paul Bruce and like-minded colleagues, the Wellington Regional Council (Greater Wellington) has withdrawn its previous backing for a Basin Reserve flyover and instead voted to take another look at transport options around the Basin. This means that two of the three supposed partners in this project do not support it, as Wellington City Council had already voted for an alternative option. Read the full story of this significant victory for our campaign here:

As this Wellington Scoop article describes: http://wellington.scoop.co.nz/?p=50038, a new alternative proposal for the Basin has been set in front of the Councils and the Government by Richard Reid and Associates. We’re glad to see that organisations concerned about sustainable transport and sensible urban design are continuing to put forward alternatives to the costly, unnecessary, ugly and disruptive flyover planned by NZTA, and we look forward to hearing more about this latest proposal.

Coming up: our public meeting on Wednesday 21 November

We have a public meeting coming up later this month. We’ll be announcing more details soon, but here are the vital ones:

Date: 21 November

Venue: St Joseph’s Church, Mt Victoria (view map)

Time: 6 – 7.30pm

Before that, please come to our next Save the Basin organising meeting. It’s on Wednesday 14 November from 5.30-7pm – please email stoptheflyover@gmail.com for venue details.

And if you can’t make the meeting but would still like to help out, or would like to go on our mailing list, please email stoptheflyover@gmail.com anyway.

Write letters and emails to the Government opposing the flyover and telling them that NZTA must be told to take another look at the alternatives. We think you should start at the top: email john.key@parliament.govt.nz

Write letters to the papers, and leave online comments on relevant articles, talking about the reasons to oppose a Basin flyover and the growing opposition at both community and local government level.

Thanks to the good work of Cr Paul Bruce and like-minded colleagues, the Wellington Regional Council (Greater Wellington) has voted to re-examine all the options for the Basin reserve, thereby backing away from their previous vote in support for the flyover project. This means that neither the Wellington City Council nor Greater Wellington are in favour of the flyover that their supposed partners, the New Zealand Transport Agency, are trying to push through.

On Wednesday, a meeting of the Council voted 7 to 6 in favour of a motion by councillor Paul Bruce, which stated that “in light of the decision to place Buckle St in a tunnel, the council resolves that Greater Wellington should work with NZTA and [Wellington City Council] to ensure that the full range of options for freeing up public transport movements through the Basin Reserve are on the table”.

Instead, the Council has resolved to “work with the NZ Transport Agency and the Wellington City Council to ensure that the full range of options for freeing up public transport movements through the Basin Reserve are on the table.”

This is excellent news. The Wellington Regional Council has joined Wellington City Council in recognising that, at a time of declining traffic movements and growing concern about climate change, the flyover is an expensive, unnecessary and massively disruptive white elephant. Now we all need to work together to get that message through to NZTA and to the Government.

We can tell people that the planned Basin Reserve flyover is a bad idea, but the argument really sticks once we can show people how bad a flyover would be. Here is the first image of our model of the planned Basin Reserve flyover next to the Basin:

First image of our model of the Government’s planned flyover next to the Basin Reserve

We think the whole Basin flyover plan is an outrageous and unnecessary waste of money. If you agree, here are some things you can do: